King Charles III and Queen Camilla will be arriving at the White House on Monday, and the Washington Post says President Donald Trump will be flaunting “his latest White House renovation: a new black granite path that the royals are expected to take to the Oval Office.”
“… [T]he president [was] eager to replace decades-old beige Tennessee flagstone with his handpicked dark granite slabs before the royal visit,” two anonymous sources told the Post. This will add to gobs of gold lettering, new fixtures and lights — all lauded by signs installed specifically to praise Trump’s work.
“‘Such attention to detail is rarely seen in the modern era!’ reads a plaque written by Trump, celebrating the marble flooring he installed in the Palm Room,” according to the Post.
Trump is so proud of his work around the Capitol that he interrupts policy meetings to talk renovation, which the Post notes was captured on camera Thursday, “when he repeatedly encouraged reporters attending a drug price announcement in the Oval Office to look at the new granite floor outside.”
“It’s a beautiful job, and it’s going up nice,” the president said, as if describing renovation destined to raise the White House’s market sale price.
Critics, however, are not so generous.
“Others call Trump’s renovations tacky, pointing to the gilding in the Oval Office, the paved-over Rose Garden and other changes that they say clash with the classical architecture of the nation’s capital,” said the Post.
“Labeling the West Wing with lettering calling it ‘The West Wing’ is simply tragic. As are so many of Trump’s signature gilded flourishes,” said Vanity Fair former editor Graydon Carter, the Spy magazine editor who helped coin the infamous epithet “short-fingered vulgarian” to describe Trump in the 1980s. “We already have a Las Vegas. We don’t need another one on the Potomac.”
And while Trump sows international chaos and high fuel prices, and his party is struggles to survive November, the Post reports his Palm Room is now littered with pictures of Trump at the White House and around the world, “including photos of him alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese Prime Minister Xi Jinping and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” according to one Post reporter. The Presidential Walk of Fame now includes plaques installed and vandalized by Trump. One mocks “Sleepy Joe Biden” as “the worst President in American history” and has an image of an autopen in lieu of Biden’s photo. Another describes the nation’s first Black president as passing “the highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act” that cost Democrats control of Congress.”
The Post notes that Trump has also installed several statues, including “ones honoringthe nation’s founding fathers, which he has displayed to visitors. The most recent addition is a sculpture by artist Chas Fagan depicting America’s Revolutionary War.”
“It’s unknown whether Trump plans to display it to the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King George III,” the Post adds.